David Chipperfield completes schematic design for the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and there are major changes. | adn (pics)


Museum expansion gets a new look

By MARK BAECHTEL
Anchorage Daily News

Published: May 1st, 2005
Last Modified: May 1st, 2005 at 02:34 AM

The next set of architectural drawings for an expanding Anchorage Museum of History and Art show dramatic interior and exterior changes.

Gone is the box-on-box treatment with its cliff-like western facade. Instead, architects have broken the box into five "slipping volumes"-- smaller boxes of varying heights and lengths, staggered to create a more complex footprint they say will ease transition between the existing museum building and the birch forest and tidal pool to the west.

Changes in interior spaces are equally striking. Architects have mostly done away with walls as continuous surfaces, instead defining the interior limits of the five volumes with load-bearing columns. Spaces between columns function as pass-throughs, or opportunities for placing displays or housing staircases and elevators.

Architects from both Chipperfield Architects of London and local liaison firm Kumin and Associates have emphasized that early designs for the museum's $75 million, 70,000-square-foot add-on were only "concepts," and users should expect more evolution as the project moves from drawing board to tape-cutting. But even for those who've followed the process closely, modifications presented in last Tuesday's public presentation were a surprise.

"With the initial designs, people had found the exterior shape a little monolithic," said Brian Davies, chairman of the museum's building committee. "But the way David Chipperfield has split the building into four or five segments and then slipped them past each other creates a very, very interesting assemblage, unlike anything else we've seen here."

"We're really excited about the way the design has come along," he said.

This latest modification is intended to bring "a more human-scaled experience" to museum patrons as they enter the building, said Chipperfield's associate director, Billy Prendergast.

"With this design, we have an opportunity to create an environment that's not flat and anonymous," said Prendergast. "We're putting space to work, creating walls with objects rather than by using solid white expanses."

The new drawings represent the second in a four-phase process. In the first or "concept design" phase, Prendergast said, designers presented original models and drawings that had won the design competition in 2003. Last week's visit marked the end of the second, or "schematic" period. Next up is the "design development" phase, during which the building's requirements for climate control, plumbing and electricity will be established and accommodated. The end-game comes this November, when architects prepare construction documents for builders. Groundbreaking may take place as early as late September or early October of 2006.

Prendergast said three imperatives guided the designers as they worked toward this modification of the original concept.

First, they wanted to preserve the design's strong addition to Anchorage's downtown landscape. Second, they wanted height to ensure that the building brings in views of the surrounding landscape and explodes the current inward-looking-treasurebox nature of the old structure.

"We wanted to create an environment that was sufficiently transparent and sufficiently translucent that you could see in and see out. As the building is now, you can drive by it and not know what's going on inside it, and when you're inside it, you have no idea what things are like outside."

Third, the design team wanted to increase the casual museum-goer's sense of the museum's internal programs.

The ethnographic objects that make up the bulk of the museum's permanent collection will join objects slated for return to the museum's Arctic Studies Center from the Smithsonian collections. These objects will be prominently featured in 8,000 square feet of display and storage areas on the second floor.

Architects have also pulled the museum's library and archives out of their current, tucked-away locations, placing them instead on the ground floor, where they will be placed, along with the museum shop and cafe, adjacent to the new lobby.

The intention is that the library and archives should be part of the face the museum presents to the public, emphasizing their part in fulfilling the educational part of the museum's mission. Temporary and traveling exhibits will be featured in a varied landscape of galleries, alcoves and cases on the upper floors.

The fruits of the architects' second set of labors now rest with the museum's building committee, which will be considering and commenting on them over the next few weeks. Museum spokeswoman Janet Asaro said she expects new drawings and models to be available in the museum's lobby sometime in the next few weeks.

Visuals will be viewable on the museum Web site at www.anchoragemuseum.org within the next two weeks. The public will have an opportunity to meet with project architects again late in the summer.